Insurance Expansions and Children’s Use of Substance Use Disorder Treatment

Sarah Hamersma and Johanna Maclean

No 24499, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We provide the first evidence on the effects of expansions to private and public insurance programs on children’s use of specialty substance use disorder (SUD) treatment. We combine administrative government data over the period 1996 to 2017 with quasi-experimental differences-in-differences methods to study this question. Expansions of the private market – laws that compel insurers to cover SUD treatment services as parity with general healthcare – increase admissions by 21%. Increases in admissions are driven by patients with private coverage and receiving outpatient care. The number of admissions of patients with no insurance also increases following parity law adoption. There is mixed evidence on changes in admissions following a public insurance expansion that increases the income eligibility thresholds for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

JEL-codes: I1 I13 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-ias
Note: CH EH
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w24499.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:24499

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w24499

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().